Your walk starts on Stationsplein, the car-free square outside Rotterdam Centraal, where the station's steel canopy points straight into a skyline of glass towers and there is no medieval centre in sight.

On Stadhuisplein, in front of the 1920 City Hall, stand Mari Andriessen's four bronze figures commemorating the people of Rotterdam killed between 1940 and 1945. The plinth carries the city motto Stronger through struggle.

On Coolsingel stands the low modernist Beurs, which opened for trading in May 1940 and survived the bombardment that flattened everything around it. A sea-green glass tower was later built straight on top of it.

The late Gothic Grote of Sint-Laurenskerk is the only medieval building left in the city centre. Gutted by fire in 1940, it was rebuilt over sixteen years rather than left as a ruin, and Erasmus stands in bronze outside.

This long open square is the filled-in bed of the river Rotte, the waterway the city is named after. Rail tracks and a metro station now run beneath it, and market stalls fill it on Tuesdays and Saturdays.

Piet Blom's Blaakse Bos: thirty-eight yellow cubes tilted at forty-five degrees on hexagonal pillars, built in the early 1980s as a way to carry housing over a busy road. One cube is open to visitors as a show home.

A horseshoe-shaped market hall with 228 apartments folded over it. Inside, the vaulted ceiling carries the vast Horn of Plenty artwork, and glass end walls flex in the wind. Food stalls fill the floor below.

Ossip Zadkine's six-metre bronze at the head of the Leuvehaven, made after the war with a hole torn through its chest. It is Rotterdam's principal memorial to the bombing of 14 May 1940 and to the civilians killed.

The walk ends at the Erasmusbrug, the 800-metre cable-stayed bridge nicknamed the Swan for its angled white pylon. Opened in 1996, it links the old centre to the redeveloped south bank and now appears in the city's logo.